What if people are exactly who they seem and we just have to learn to listen to our intuition?
Cheating is hardly an unusual human experience. That's why it always surprises me when cheating scandals become so massive. The public reacts to them as if they'd just witnessed the collapse of civilization. When something like this happens, people's fantasies and fears around trust, romance, self-esteem, humiliation, intimacy, and deception resurface, and everyone starts using the scandal to elaborate on what they fear.
We project all sorts of things onto celebrities' scandals. That's why I think celebrities should never take this sort of thing personally. The public always takes a person and puts them in an archetypal box, and then throws a bunch of adjectives and categories at them.
This doesn't mean their attitudes cannot be objectively wrong or morally questionable; they're just as questionable as anyone else's, but we relate to those attitudes as we relate to fictional characters: we turn them into simplified prototypes of human behaviour that help us understand and process conflict.
When we know someone deeply, it's much harder to put them into a box; we can't say that someone we know intimately is a good or a bad person as easily as we can say that about a fictional character or a celebrity. That's why I think celebrities are (unknowingly, because they are actually real people like everyone else) serving a function within society.
Celebrity scandals like the recent one with Ethan Klein can become extraordinary scenarios for analyzing general discourses about love, monogamy, treason, and human morality. One thing I've reflected on with this particular one is that people are often not who they seem.
We spend so much time trying to reconcile our own first impression of them with their perfectly crafted public persona, only to be disappointed later when we realize that they're exactly who they seemed at first.
At any rate, I'd love this type of knowledge to be portrayed on random loading screens that only appear one time while you're loading a video game at 3 AM on a Tuesday. It's just the allure of their fleeting wisdom. Knowing that you're seeing something that only appeared once and possibly only to you and three other people around the world.
I totally think video games should incorporate this practice; they'd become like strange oracles or vessels for eerie, seemingly ancient knowledge. And I would love to work as the writer of the loading screens and choose at which specific time they'd show on someone's screen and in which places in the world. If you're a video game developer and you're reading this, please hire me! Lol.
So the next time you see a celebrity scandal happening, try to approach it like this: observe what's happening in the background and what fantasies the public is projecting onto the scandal.
About the loading screens, I can only tell you that the ones I've collected for this meme list were real, and you got to see them as a message from beyond.
Loading complete.